Fame and Fortune

by Frederic Raphael

Fame and Fortune is the long-awaited continuation of Frederic Raphael’s best-selling novel The Glittering Prizes , which followed a generation of Cambridge graduates into the academic and media world of the 1960s. In this new book, Successful novelist and screenwriter Adam Morris, now in his late forties, remains the central character, but many of his contemporaries continue to feature in his life. These include the ambitious and endlessly scheming movie director Mike Clode; the Australian-born TV star Alan Parks, who now seems to front every other serious or semi-serious program on TV; and Joyce Hadleigh, whose career  on TV Alan has fostered—just as years earlier at Cambridge, he fathered her child whom Dan Bradley, now a primary school headmaster in Wandsworth, raised as his own. The vivid complexity of Fame and Fortune reflects not only the nature of London life in the era of Margaret Thatcher but also the changing attitudes and lifestyles of a younger generation. Adam and his wife Barbara find themselves faced with the defection of their son, Tom, to a Christian sect that leads him to drop out of university and desert his family a situation that is compounded, with disconcerting consequences, when their beautiful, successful daughter Rachel meets Adam’s college friend Bill Bourne, the son of a scouse docker, now a professor in California. In varying ways, the other characters too discover the fragility of the success and happiness they had enjoyed, as violence and death play cruel, sudden parts in their lives.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.

Reviews

[Alexis Hall]

I am still using pandemic time to take on the unread books on my kindle--for better or worse.

I'm not entirely sure why I own this book, where I bought it, or why: I think I was here for Oxbridge Gits Behaving Shittily but, for whatever reason, I bounced off pretty hard. Maybe I needed to have read the first book to have a clue what was going on (I don't think I was aware it was a second book at the point of reading) and I have no idea if it was me or the book.

But by chapter four I realised it was little more than a succession of interchangeable, unlikeable people I had no context for knowing or being interested in exchanging sly bon mots, some of which were occasionally amusing.

That ought to have been my thing. But on this occasion wasn't. Very much a case of "not you, it's me" I think.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chilly, smart and witty
This novel revisits the characters from the author's The Glittering Prizes, published thirty-one years previously, and translates them into the late-70s (the previous book was set in the mid-50s / early-60s). The protagonist in both stories is Adam Morris, a clever, witty Jewish writer who went to St John's College Cambridge, writes screenplays and translates classical literature as well as writing novels, has won a Best Screenplay Oscar and has been married to the same woman for much of his life. If you thought that this sounds remarkably like Frederic Raphael, you'd be right, and you could then maybe be forgiven for wondering whether the other characters in these books were also based on real people, and whether the dialogue had anything to do with what the author had said to them or - perhaps more interestingly - what he wished he'd said (I'm reminded of one of the stories in Raphael's Oxbridge Blues, which consists almost entirely of two characters spewing elegant invective at each other and has always struck me - perhaps misguidedly - as arising from some personal sense of quarrelsome resentment on the part of the author).

This isn't a trivial point, because there's an awful lot of dialogue here, and the author has decided to use it to drive the story forward, with minimal scene-setting - or even very much indication of who's speaking. Such allusion can lead to confusion on the part of the reader, because the author's overwhelming desire to have his characters say witty and penetratingly brilliant things *all the time* leads to a uniformity that can obscure any distinction between them. They can also end up speaking what looks like nonsense, as Anna (whom Adam tries "to believe [...] had been, as she had, *the* actress of their Cambridge generation" [p288]) does: "I've found God, you know. Of a kind. The kind that isn't there, and isn't kind."

There's another - more minor - sense in which it appears that the author's less interested in who they are than in what he can make them say. Two characters from the previous book were named Barbara Parks and Francesca Pope; here - apparently because there are two other more prominent characters who also have those Christian names - they're called Shirley and Fay. This is in spite of the fact that little confusion was caused by all four of them being together in the previous novel (Adam Morris even points out on p247 of this book that it's quite possible to know people with the same name in real life). In a similar vein, another character (Bill Bourne) now seems to come from Liverpool, rather than the Birmingham his origins were assigned to in the previous book.

I was slightly annoyed to come across these glitches because I greatly enjoyed The Glittering Prizes (even naively thinking of it, at one point, as a kind of handbook on how to speak and behave once you got to university) and wanted to find out how the characters had turned out. This is an entertaining, smart account of what they ended up saying to each other, but seems to have been constructed without any affection for them, or any apparent feeling for what they were supposed to be.

Originally reviewed 31 August 2010

[Dan Lalande · Rating 3 out of 5]

They're back, that tight-knit group of post-war Cambridge graduates cum la crème de la cultural crème, criss-crossing each others' bumpy paths across the Thatcher years in this, Fredric Raphael's sequel to 'The Glittering Prizes.' This is Raphael at spirited play, each melodramatic development inspiring epic battles of distinctly British badinage. While much of this is attributable to its roots as a radio play, concessions to the novelistic are but token. Small matter; if you're a fan of such exercises, Raphael's bon mots are to gorge like bonbons.

[David Highton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intertwined lives of an author and his family and Cambridge contemporaries in arts, film and the media